Former Navy SEAL turns to treatment after survivor’s guilt and PTSD from a failed Afghan mission led to substance abuse, legal trouble

One in a series of stories about homeless veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It was 5 o’clock on a July morning, and Nathan’s mother stopped the car on Park Boulevard.

They looked at the collection of San Diego’s homeless veterans stretching up the block. It was a line of haggard faces, all waiting to get a warm meal and a cot for the weekend.

Nathan, a tall, broad-shouldered former Navy SEAL, was under a court order to join them. His precarious high-wire act fueled by alcohol and post-traumatic stress disorder had finally collapsed, ending in a dust-up outside a bar and a criminal charge.

A judge mandated treatment, starting with the “Stand Down” event for homeless vets.

Nathan remembers that morning, less than seven months ago. His mother cried.

He was becoming one of them. He was already one of them.

“I was on the way out. I’ve put a gun in my mouth. I’ve felt it in my mouth. I’ve not known if there was a round in the chamber because I’ve been so drunk. And I’ve pulled the trigger,” said the 29-year-old San Diego native.

“I was in a bad, bad spot.”

Nathan, who doesn’t want his last name printed because of his pending legal case, came home from Afghanistan with haunted thoughts.

His mind still carries the image of 11 buddies whose remains he had to gather after a disastrous June 2005 mission in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains. It was the single largest loss of life for Navy SEALs at that point since World War II: Operation Red Wings.

Three SEALs were killed in a firefight, and eight SEALs died when a rescue helicopter went down. Nathan was one of the remaining team members sent to collect the bodies and put them into bags.

When he left the SEALs after five years, he couldn’t shake it. He carried the guilt of surviving while they had not. So he numbed up.

“It was very hard to go in public when I first got out. I froze up in the airport. I remember the first time I came back from combat, this is after I lost all my buddies, I just froze. I didn’t even move,” he said. “I would sweat, sweat, sweat — booze. OK, I feel good now.”

On the surface, he was lucky. He got an easy, high-money job for a security contractor, teaching people weapons. But underneath he wasn’t the good-times guy.

What people didn’t see was the darkened room, the bottle of Jameson whiskey and the obsessive Internet searches on military topics. The cocaine.

“I was making four times as much, and I was working a lot less. So I had a lot more time to get in trouble,” he said. “For a guy like me — any operator who’s been to combat — if you have idle time and money in your pocket, nine times out of 10 you’re going to go booze. Because you don’t want to be alone.”

Nathan’s mother said the family knew something was wrong. Her son had been the life of the party, a bit of a hot dog. Now he wouldn’t sleep on a bed, only the floor. They were afraid to do anything that might spook him.

When she opened his bedroom, she was sometimes scared she might find him dead.

“The biggest thing we saw was, he didn’t want to be around people anymore,” said his mother, who asked that her name not be printed.

“We didn’t even understand what he was going through, not even in the least,” she said.

Four years after discharge, the downward spiral turned into a frenzy.

Outside a bar, he had a heated exchange with a group of guys who saw it as a threat. It led to a criminal charge.

It meant he couldn’t work with firearms while the case maneuvered through the court system. His outside world fell apart, finally mirroring his state of mind.

“When you start adding substance abuse, it turns that PTSD into something that is uncontrollable. It literally is uncontrollable,” Nathan said during two days of interviews at Veterans Village of San Diego, where he received court-ordered treatment for PTSD.

“And it ate me up. And I allowed it to eat me up.”

He agreed to tell his story because he wants people to know it happens, even to former Navy SEALs.

Unable to work as before, Nathan holed up in his brother’s house. His savings dwindled. He came out once a day to find food. Otherwise he stayed in his room, with the whiskey. He didn’t call anyone. When his parents phoned, he threatened to run to Mexico.

His brother moved, and Nathan faced a choice: Ask his parents if he might move back. Or hit the streets. Listening to the thunderclouds in his head, he chose the latter.

He was lucky. It was only a couple cold nights sleeping in his truck near the Ocean Beach Pier. His phone rang, and his parents told him to come home. He did.

But that didn’t solve his problems.

Nathan elected for his case to go through San Diego County veterans court. The court, which opened in early 2011 and is one of several in the state, allows former service members with mental-health problems to get probation for their charges if they seek treatment. Some convictions are even dismissed.

The court was created to help first-time offenders. People convicted of major crimes, such as rape or attempted murder, aren’t eligible.

Nathan and his mother say that getting arrested may have kept him alive.

“The best thing we did was not bail him out,” she said.

The former SEAL’s rehab came through Veterans Village, the Pacific Highway nonprofit organization that offers a 120-day residential program. But the court first made him appear at this summer’s “Stand Down,” a military term for a pause in the action.

As a touchstone, Nathan kept the cutoffs and T-shirt he wore that July day, when his mom dropped him off on Park Boulevard. Veterans from the streets appear once a year for the Veterans Village event at San Diego High School.

They come for haircuts and showers, free clothes and shoes. Some people arrive in hope of getting their legal disputes handled by on-site lawyers. Many are gray-haired men who served during the Vietnam War era. They are not new to the streets.

Young faces from the post-Sept. 11 generation of veterans are still fairly rare there.

By the time Nathan arrived, hundreds of people were waiting along Park Boulevard, their belongings bundled in tarps and stacked in shopping carts.

The former SEAL remembers it was hard to step out of the car. His mother said she worried he would skulk off after she drove away.

“I didn’t know anything about Stand Down,” Nathan said. “I was just told to show up at this address on this date. And I showed up and it was just like, ‘Oh, man. There’s a thousand bums, and I’m one of them.’”

Life in treatment has been an about-face for the former petty officer second class. No more Jameson. No more sullen silences.

Until last week, he lived in a dorm room with three other guys at Veterans Village. His world consisted of two metal bunks and a shared bathroom.

In one class, they read aloud from an Alcoholics Anonymous book. They discussed spirituality in another hourlong session. Nathan fidgeted in class. Sitting still isn’t natural for him.

But getting numb can’t be the answer anymore. Nathan believes that PTSD means he can never touch alcohol again.

“If I do, I’m going to kill somebody or kill myself. People think they can, but they can’t. It’s a tough pill to swallow. I didn’t want to swallow it at 22,” he said.

“The party’s over, and it’s time to grow up. It’s time to be a man,” he said. “I’m a former frickin’ Navy SEAL. I’m supposed to be working in the White House right now. And I’m living here. I don’t say it like that; this place saved my life. But look where I’m living. I’m a homeless veteran.”

Nathan also believes that he never would have become an alcoholic if he hadn’t witnessed combat, hadn’t seen his buddies dead. There would have been nothing to numb, he said.

It possibly didn’t have to go this way.

Nathan went to the La Jolla VA to file his paperwork upon discharge from the Navy in 2007. He sat in a room with VA doctors for an assessment. They heard about his drinking. They saw from his records where he had been.

They wanted to admit him then for PTSD treatment, according to Nathan’s memory of the meeting. But he wasn’t having it. He was still in tough-guy mode, learned from years of the-only-easy-day-was-yesterday military culture.

“I said, ‘Thank you very much. It’s been very nice. I’ll get back to you guys on Monday.’ And I didn’t call them for five years,” he said. “Now, looking back, that would have been an awesome plan.”

His mother said doctors called the house, trying to convince him. Nathan was in denial. But his mother admits that the family played a role, too.

“Part of it was us. We said, ‘Oh, you can’t say you have post-traumatic. You’ll never get a decent job,’” she said.

Nathan thinks combat vets, in particular those from special operations, should get at least three months to decompress before returning to normal American life. He calls the idea a “retreat,” where service members take classes on the interaction of PTSD and drugs or alcohol and tackle their VA paperwork.

The Navy SEAL and Marine Corps Special Operations commands already try this tactic, on a smaller scale.

Since 2008, the SEALs send troops returning home from combat to an undisclosed spot outside of the United States for two to three days of what is called “third location decompression.” Then they go home to their families.

Nathan graduated from Veterans Village last week and moved out on his own. He recently got his VA disability benefits approved, providing a steady trickle of money. He’s got an employment deal lined up with a company that produces military gear. His legal case still dangles.

In five years, he wants to be successful in a company he has started. Entrepreneurship is a common goal among combat vets. They’ve seen what they can accomplish. And they want to be the ones giving the orders.

Nathan’s mom can’t look that far ahead for her son. She knows his family can’t be his safety net again.

“We’re just happy that he’s where he is now,” she said. “I would like to see him happy and come to grips with his (survivor’s) guilt.”

In the meantime, Nathan said he is giving himself permission to accept help.

“I want to enjoy life,” he said. “I fought for this country. I deserve the benefits that this country has to offer.”